A call-out to the Apple community - an Australian Mac user group needs your help to celebrate Apple's 30th anniversary

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A call-out to the Apple community - an Australian Mac user group needs your help to celebrate Apple's 30th anniversary

Date Created: 07 Nov, 2006, 09:04 PM

In case you've forgotten amidst the excitement of waiting for the Microsoft Zune to be released next week, a small fruit-symbol computer company is celebrating 30 years since its conception.

Yes, 2006 marks thirty years of changing people's lives, mostly for the better, for the little computer company that could - Apple.

Here in Melbourne, one Macintosh user group, iMUG, has decided to do something to acknowledge how profound those changes have been for its members. (Declaration: Up unti November 28, I am iMug's Vice-President)

A team has assembled a collection of significant Apple products, but more importantly has located the important stories associated with these Apple hardware and software, as told by the end user - people like you and me.

We've asked those who have interesting stories to describe how their Apple products changes their lives, whether at work, in education, family, social or howsoever.

But rather than simply have a monthly meeting where they're invited to speak about their stories, we've gone a little further. Actually, a lot further.

In fact, many months ago, in anticipation of Apple's milestone achievement - surviving, when so many other computing companies fell by the wayside - we approached one of the most prestigious museums in Australia, Museum Victoria, to put on a display.

We knew that the Museum had a special interest in technology and computing.
Especially important was that it housed the fourth computer ever built in the world, CSIRAC (1949, above left), and it remains the only intact computer of the "first generation" anywhere in the world.

So we approached its science and technology curator, David Dement, and suggested the Museum might like to tell the story of the modern PC through the history of Apple Inc. We spent some time explaining how many of the breakthroughs we now take for granted in personal computer either originated within Apple computers, or Apple pushed along the existing technology when others let it sit around doing nothing.

The original Bondi Blue iMac - the first equipment Apple produced when Steve Jobs returned in 1997 - eschewed all connections Apple had originated like SCSI and ADB ports, as well as floppies, and utilised USB 1.0 exclusively. The PC world had USB first given it was Intel's invention, but hadn't bothered much with it, preferring to use those strange colour coded connections for mouse and keyboard, as well as parallel and serial ports for other peripherals. On the iMac, it was USB everything, allowing it to use PC peripherals hitherto unavailable to Mac users.

So armed with this kind of technological knowledge as well as other information such that we could trace an innovation timeline using Apple hardware and software, Museum Victoria gave iMug the green light to curate a month long community exhibition where we would tell the story - via equipment display, posters and podcasts - of the PC revolution through Apple's history.

We're less than a month away, and frankly while we have some great stories to tell - this is about how people use Apple products for make a difference - we're running into a rather diffident Apple Australia upon whom we'd counted for a quantity of support.

Now, given that I was possessed of much biographical information about Steve Jobs, I had early in the piece warned the organising committee that we shouldn't expect much co-operation from Apple. Jobs never looks back, and only keeps marching forward. Whatever lessions are learnt from failure are never made public or admitted to... witness the Cube which was selected for the Museum of Modern Art, and we see iconically on display out front of the new Apple New York store there on Fifth Avenue.

No, Jobs only operates on forward gears with no reverse. No Newtons were to be displayed either, despite their "ahead of the game" introduction by a John Sculley-led Apple.

So we came to expect little formal co-operation from Apple. But we have been surprised but not shocked to learn that many if not most of the videos we wanted to show on current model display iMacs, such as Apple Keynotes and those famous advertisements like 1984 and Think Different, were not permitted to be shown due to copyright restrictions.

We have to stick by the rules here given the Museum is a government institution.

So now I come to the reason for the blog entry:

I'm reaching out to the Apple community and asking for video material for which you own the copyright which we could use as part of our story telling exhibition. It might be video you took of a Keynote at MacWorld or WWDC, or something exciting the world has never seen!

So here's your chance to help us out. If you have material you think is suitable contact me by email (lesposen@mac.com) and we can discuss it. If it's the right stuff, we can also discuss how to get it to me in a useable format (eg Quicktime movie, mpg, etc).

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Les